Tone, intonation, stress and duration in Navajo Item Type text; Article Authors Kidder, Emily Publisher University of Arizona Linguistics Circle (Tucson, Arizona) Journal Coyote Papers: Working Papers in Linguistics, Linguistic Theory at the University of Arizona Rights http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ Download date 25/09/2021 21:50:14 Item License Copyright © is held by the author(s). Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/126405 Tone, Intonation, Stress and Duration in Navajo Emily Kidder University of Arizona Abstract 1 Introduction The phonological categories of tone, stress, duration and intonation interact in interesting and complex ways in the world’s languages. One reason for this is that they all use the phonetic cues of pitch and duration in different ways in order to be understood as phonologically meaningful. The Navajo language has unique prosodic characteristics that make it particularly valuable for the study of how pitch and duration interact on a phonological level. Navajo is a tonal language, and also has phonemic length, however, the existence of prosodic elements such as intonation and stress have been a matter of debate among scholars (De Jong and McDonough, 1993; McDonough, 1999). In- tonation has been assumed to be a universal characteristic, present in tonal and non-tonal languages alike, though evidence to the contrary has been pre- sented (Connell and Ladd, 1990; Laniran, 1992; McDonough, 2002). Stress or accent is similarly thought to be a manifested on some level in all lan- guages, even when it is not used contrastively (Hayes, 1995). In this paper I explore the evidence available for whether or not stress and intonation exists in Navajo. I first give an overview of both the phonetics of prosody in section 2, and the phonology of prosody in section 3. In section 4, I go over how these prosodic characteristics surface in Navajo, arguing the hypothesis that a meaningful lack of stress is apparent in Navajo, which is caused by the fact that it contrastively uses the acoustic cues for stress for other purposes. I also hypothesize that this can be considered to be a causal factor in the lack of intonation that has been noted by native speakers. 55 Emily Kidder 2 The Phonetics of Prosody: Overview In the study of prosody, or the rhythmic and intonational elements in lan- guage, the phonetic properties of pitch and duration play an important role. In this section, an overview of the general properties of prosodic elements is given. 2.1 Segmental Duration The phonetic notion of segmental duration is a complex notion that has a va- riety of repercussions in many areas of phonetics and phonology. Differences in the duration of segments can be measured along a continuum of length by looking at the physical speech signal. Yet the perception of duration is rela- tive, and can be effected by other phonological phenomena (i.e. vowels tend to lengthen word finally or before a voiced obstruent). Both vowels and con- sonants can vary in length, and in many languages long vs. short vowels, or geminate vs. non-geminate consonants are different phonemes, and are cued by continuing the speech sound for a relatively shorter or longer space of time. Length crucially distinguishes between phonemes in many languages, an example of which is Finnish. Finnish shows a distinction between both long and short vowels, and long and short consonants, as in the following example: (1) a. [tuli] ‘fire’ b. [tuuli] ‘wind’ c. [tulli] ‘customs’ (Karlsson, 1999, p.10) Duration operates in a segmental or syllabic domain, but not in the domain of words or phrases. Duration in the syllabic domain is dealt with in moraic theory, where it plays a key role in the notion of syllable weight. In moraic theory, a mora is a unit of syllable weight: a syllable with one mora is termed a light syllable, while a syllable with more than one mora is heavy (Hayes, 1995). Syllable weight, which is cued by duration, also plays an important role in the assignment of stress, which will be discussed in more detail in Section 3. 56 Tone, Intonation, Stress and Duration in Navajo 2.2 Segmental Pitch/Tone The phonetic phenomenon of pitch, or fundamental frequency, is created by the vibration of the vocal cords during speech. Pitch and intensity are related notions, and higher pitch tends to be accompanied by higher intensity. This is because in order to raise pitch, a higher sub-glottal pressure must occur which causes the vocal cords to vibrate more rapidly. This higher sub-glottal pressure also causes an utterance to be louder (have a higher intensity level). Tone can be defined as the phonologically contrastive use of pitch in the domain of the segment or syllable (Yip, 2002), and when this is present it is termed a tonal language. A tonal language can have a variety of different tonal systems, some simply have a distinction between High tone and Non- High (Low) tone, while others can have many more levels. Some languages also have contour tones, in which the pitch can rise or fall over the course of the segment or syllable. An example of a tonal language with both level and contour tones is Cantonese, which is outlined in (2): (2) [yau] a. high level ‘worry’ b. high rising ‘paint’ c. mid level ‘thin’ d. low level ‘again’ e. very low level ‘oil’ f. low rising ‘have’ (Yip, 2002, p.2) Tone can be measured phonetically by looking at the pitch track of an utter- ance, which is a measure of the fundamental frequency of the speech sound. Though pitch is the primary cue for phonological tone, scholars have noted that high tones also have the correlates of high intensity and longer duration. Intensity, however, has been found to be less perceptible to hearers, and as was discussed above, there are anatomical reasons behind why pitch and in- tensity may often co-occur. Tonal languages also have a tendency to assign stress to higher toned syllables, as is discussed in De Lacy (2002), which also makes sense because higher tones are likely to have longer durations, and stress is often correlated with heavy syllables. Tone is the manifestation of pitch in the domain of the segment or syllable, and also plays an important role in intonation. 57 Emily Kidder 2.3 Phrasal Pitch/Intonation Another place where pitch and duration play important roles is in the do- main of intonation. Intonation has been described as being very similar to tone, only realized in the domain of the utterance rather than the domain of the word or syllable. Stress or accent also plays a crucial role in into- nation, as the peaks and valleys in an intonation contour are very likely to co-occur with the stressed syllables in a word (Beckman and Pierrehumbert, 1986). Intonation and its internal structure are fundamentally related to the structuring of discourse topics and the conveyance of pragmatic information in human speech. The various factors that make up intonation, primarily pitch contours that vary across a phrase, have been a subject of interest for scholars who wish to uncover what kinds of pragmatic and syntactic meaning they add to speech. The primary method of intonation analysis involves the use of the Tones and Breaks Indices (ToBI) system of transcription, devel- oped by Beckman and Elam (1993). The ToBI transcription system, based on the work of Pierrehumbert (1980), provides a model for transcribing the intonation contour by breaking up the intonational phrase into discrete units of High and Low accents, which are hierarchically structured. This system utilizes both the physical speech signal analyzed by a computer, and the transcriber’s perception of the contours. The physical speech signal for into- nation is the pitch track, or the measure of the fundamental frequency over the course of the utterance. 3 The Phonology of Prosody: An Overview The phonetic aspects of pitch and duration are manifested in many ways on the phonological level of language. Acoustically, the roles of pitch and duration are different from one language to another, and how languages treat them phonologically is affected by what else is phonologically salient in the language. The following overview looks at how stress and intonation are manifested in language, and how they relate to the phonetic correlates of pitch and duration. 3.1 Lexical Stress Stress is the ‘linguistic manifestation of rhythmic structure’ (Hayes, 1995, p.1), which is cued both by pitch as well as longer duration and higher inten- 58 Tone, Intonation, Stress and Duration in Navajo sity (though intensity has been shown to play a minor role in the perception of stress (Hayes, 1995), so will not be dealt with here). Stress is parasitic; it has no particular physical realization of its own, but instead it relies on the phonetic correlates of other phenomena, including pitch and duration. Stress is often assigned based on the foot structure of a particular lan- guage. In metrical theory, words are broken up into smaller units called feet, which normally consist of two syllables, or two moras. Stress is then assigned to either the first syllable in the foot (trochaic), or the second syl- lable (iambic), and can be assigned hierarchically as primary, secondary, etc. Many languages, such as Latin, have stress systems that are affected by syl- lable weight also, so regardless of where the default stress would occur in a word, if a heavy syllable is present, it will acquire stress. 3.1.1 Relation of Stress to Contrastive Length Acoustically, stress is perceived differently depending on the language. This is often determined by what else is present in the language that might be perceptually effected by it.